A diagram of Carpathia's new cloud hosting solution, taken from the comapny's whatisinstanton.com website.
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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Carpathia Hosting (www.carpathiahosting.com) threw its hat into the cloud computing ring this week, launching its “AlwaysOn/InstantOn fully-managed enterprise cloud solution,” and introducing a significant twist on the established cloud computing thinking.
Carpathia’s cloud product employs a “hybrid” model, says chief technology officer Jon Greaves, expressing a philosophy that recognizes the advantages inherent in the much-hyped technology, but that also acknowledges some of its limitations.
“There’s a lot of myth about virtualization and cloud computing really reducing the amount of effort customers have in managing infrastructure,” says Greaves. “What it really does is reduce the amount of hardware, but increases the complexity.”
The cloud computing landscape is increasingly crowded with new offerings and entries, many of them built to compete on the semi standard cloud hosting model established by companies like Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid.
“Our approach is pretty radically different,” says Greaves. “We see cloud computing and traditional dedicated infrastructure being a very natural compliment to each other in the same environment.”
Carpathia’s approach is dictated in large part by the company’s more consultative approach to managed hosting. It isn’t the sort of provider with a menu of prefab products offered up on its website. The company’s services range from colocation to very involved managed hosting engagements, in which the company takes an active role in designing the customer’s solution.
The offering includes a lot of new terminology – the Carpathia AlwaysOn component describes the company’s managed hosting services, and InstantOn describes its cloud computing platform. The company calls its approach to combining the two services Cloud Orchestration.
It’s a complex offering, and one the company is likely to spend a significant amount of time describing in the weeks to come. For one, Carpathia is planning a live webcast on June 16, featuring Greaves and several customers. Registration for the webcast is available at the site www.whatisinstanton.com.
From Carpathia’s consultative point of view, says Greaves, the challenge in deploying cloud computing solutions for customers, is identifying the holes that can be filled by cloud computing, rather than replacing existing solutions altogether. Of course the scalability advantages of cloud are attractive, but in many cases, dedicated solutions are more cost effective or better performing, particularly if the money is available to make a considerable investment – which is often the case with Carpathia’s enterprise customers.
“To give you a good example, if you go to Amazon and price yourself 32 terabytes of storage, I think it’s about $4,800 a month,” he says. “If you were to price that with a dedicated [NAS solution], it’s typically half the price. The catch is that the increments are very large steps. You have to have a whole storage array, or a whole server.”
One of the challenges for Carpathia is in confronting the commonly held notion that the cloud computing technology is an either-or decision.
“A lot of people treat cloud as sort of exclusive from anything else – from colocation especially, and from managed services,” says Greaves. “We see cloud filling a very interesting void, where if you need to scale in fractions of a machine, or if you need to scale in gigabytes, it’s a very cost effective solution. But what you also find is that if you can commit to a whole machine, for instance a whole storage array, cloud is not actually a cost-effective solution”
Along with introducing the new technology, Carpathia announced in a separate release that it had designed specific hybrid solutions for a series of beta customers, including Echo360, Voices Heard Media, Ventraq and Nuvulous – a rather lengthy discussion that provides some interesting insight into the possibilities for hybrid implantations of managed services and cloud hosting. The press release in its entirety is posted on the company’s website.
Illustrated partly by these customer projects is the fact that Carpathia is also working to distinguish its cloud offering as being part of a managed hosting relationship. The company says its AlwaysOn/InstantOn solutions are backed by the company’s “E3 Promise,” which distinguishes a level of customer service associated with the Carpathia’s managed services. Its cloud solutions include security patches, monitoring and protection from viruses and malware, as well as customer support.
Technologically, the company’s cloud solution is built on the Citrix Xen hypervisor, used in building a lot of the cloud hosting platforms out there. Greaves says the company has done “an awful lot of integration work,” in order to create a solution that really reduces the significance of the underlying technology to the customers, who really just deal with machine images that arrive as needed.
While the cloud computing product is largely a response to customer demand for some of the advantages cloud computing presents, says Greaves, part of Carpathia’s role in designing a solution has been helping to educate customers on what to expect – and what to desire – from cloud computing.
“Something we’ve been making noise about,’ he says, “is you can’t treat this any different from the rest of your infrastructure. You need to have it managed the same way.”
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